Revelation Perth International Film Festival is one of those events that film people either love intensely or have never heard of. There’s not much middle ground. For twenty-plus years, it’s been programming the kind of cinema that makes you question what cinema can be, and I think the Australian film landscape is better for it.

What Makes Revelation Different

Where most Australian festivals aim for a broad audience, Revelation aims for an adventurous one. The program routinely includes experimental cinema, video art, expanded cinema events, performance-based work, and films from parts of the world that other Australian festivals rarely touch.

This isn’t contrarianism for its own sake. The programming team has genuine expertise in non-mainstream cinema and a clear curatorial vision. They’re not just showing weird films. They’re arguing, through their programming, that cinema is a broader and more interesting art form than the conventional festival model acknowledges.

The result is a festival where you might see a three-hour Romanian philosophical essay film in one session and a West African documentary in the next, followed by an expanded cinema performance in a gallery space. It’s demanding, sometimes exhausting, and frequently extraordinary.

The Perth Context

Perth’s isolation has traditionally been seen as a disadvantage for cultural events. It’s expensive to bring filmmakers from the eastern states, let alone internationally. The local media market is smaller. The audience base is more limited.

But Revelation has turned isolation into identity. The festival is unlike anything else in Australia precisely because it doesn’t need to compete with MIFF or SFF on their terms. It can program with a fearlessness that comes from operating outside the expectations of the eastern states festival ecosystem.

The Perth film community, while smaller than Melbourne’s or Sydney’s, is passionate and supportive. Revelation screenings are well-attended, and the audience brings a genuine engagement that comes from being part of a community rather than just consuming an event.

Why This Matters for Australian Cinema

Australian cinema needs spaces for experimentation and risk. If every festival programs conservatively, if every funding body prioritises commercial viability, if every distributor insists on accessible narratives, the range of Australian filmmaking narrows.

Revelation is one of the spaces that keeps that range wide. By programming Australian experimental work alongside international boundary-pushing cinema, it shows local filmmakers that there’s an audience for ambitious, unconventional work. And it exposes audiences to ways of making cinema that they might never encounter otherwise.

Several Australian filmmakers whose experimental shorts screened at Revelation have gone on to make features that pushed formal boundaries. The festival didn’t just screen their work. It validated an approach to filmmaking that the mainstream industry doesn’t always support.

The 2026 Edition

The 2026 program is still being finalised, but based on the festival’s track record and the wider landscape of non-mainstream cinema, expect a strong international program with particular strength in Asian and Eastern European experimental work.

The Australian section will likely feature a mix of new experimental shorts, expanded cinema works, and the occasional feature that defies conventional categorisation. Revelation has always been good at discovering Australian work that other festivals overlook.

The festival usually runs in July, which makes it a good counterpoint to the MIFF-dominated Australian festival calendar. For anyone planning their festival year, Revelation is worth the trip to Perth, or at least worth following for its selections and programming statements.

The Bigger Argument

I come back to this point often: a healthy national cinema needs diversity of approach. Mainstream festivals, genre festivals, documentary festivals, and experimental festivals all serve different functions and nurture different types of filmmaking.

Revelation’s function is to hold space for the strange, the challenging, and the genuinely original. In a media landscape that increasingly rewards the familiar and the algorithmic, that function is more important than ever.

If you’ve never attended Revelation, consider it. You’ll see things that surprise you, things that confuse you, and things that change how you think about what cinema can be. That’s exactly what a festival should do.